jodiet.com Blog

What does it mean for the rest of us when the lives of the greatest poets of our time can be summed up in one 8 ½ X 11 single-spaced page of prose? Their whole lives from birth through grade school to death are contained in just one short synopsis. What does it mean for the morning-toilers whose only motivation for dragging themselves from sleep hours before dawn to create strings of words is the coffee brewing, too expensive to waste? What will the epitaph be for the writer whose greatness is never disseminated beyond her own region, town, family or even her own mind? And where does that leave me? Though I keep plugging forward, writing these words, doing the job, and somehow convincing myself it means something, I wonder, does it mean SOMETHING? Of all the greatness I believe I stow somewhere deep within and which I have the potential to become, I can’t help but wonder if I am fooling myself into thinking these words on this paper matter to anyone in the world but me. And, really, does it even matter to ME? Day after day, I cajole myself into believing it all means something; that these words, this dream to share these words, and the courage to offer these words to share means I am a writer unlike those who have just as much talent but are not fearless or foolish enough to risk others’ eyes. I wonder if it is all a masquerade; a scene I play for myself to prevent myself from succumbing to the everyday drudgery pounding on my door seemingly more and more persistently. Some days I know believing this greatness is within is merely a trick. I play the trick loyally because I know the day I cease believing in the charade and succumb to what I fear is the truth is the day I slip into bottomless suffocating depression. Writing is a game of denial and I am a master. I trick the beast with the mantra, “It matters”. So if proven greatness can be reduced to one page, where DOES that leave me? Perhaps a brief synopsis of perseverance and courage that only mattered BECAUSE it mattered to me.

I am fat. According to my BMI, I’m even obese. My little fitness coach on Wii fit agrees. Every time I take the body test, the virtual me balloons up and its squeaky voice declares, “That’s obese.” I wasn’t always fat. But I’ve always struggled with my weight.

Tired of being chubby, at fourteen I worked with my mom to develop a diet. She purchased sugar-free kool-aid, I stopped taking my evening snack, and started exercising to the Jane Fonda workout every evening after dinner. This was the easiest time I ever had losing weight. Within a few months, my clothes were much looser, I’d lost a significant amount of weight and finally started to feel good about myself. It seems it is always the first time losing weight that is the easiest, it’s the third time or the tenth time that it gets from difficult to balancing on the verge of impossible.

If it works, you keep doing it to a greater degree, right? So as I moved to high school and through tenth grade, I restricted my calories even more and took up jogging. A couple of traumatic events occurred in my life around ninth and tenth grade that I’m sure played a part in my eating and exercise habits as well. It’s the same old story—like my grades, my weight was something I could control when everything else in my life was out of control. By the time I got to my junior year, I ate a ½ cup of cereal with a ¼ cup of milk for breakfast and one serving of whatever my mom cooked for dinner. I skipped lunch. The rest of the time, I sustained myself on sugar-free kool-aid and jolly ranchers. On top of that, I jogged a half an hour then immediately walked a half an hour nearly every day. And when it was nice outside, I might throw in a bike ride or an extra walk.

Looking back, I realize I probably had an eating disorder. Not only did I burn every calorie I ate but I was obsessed with my weight. I avoided offers of food by telling myself that the offerer just wanted to get me fat again. I felt horrible when I had to miss a day of exercise. I enjoyed the fact that I could suck in my stomach, touch my thumbs together at the front of my waist and just about touch my pinkies together at my back. I used my eating and exercise habits as a wall to protect myself from what was falling apart around me and from anyone else who might try to get in. I was never diagnosed or even suspected of having an eating disorder. I never got sickly skinny; I got down to 110 pounds at my lowest which is in the healthy range for my height. And I ate; I didn’t eat much but I did eat, once in awhile even splurging to let myself pig out at a buffet.

When I went to college, I gained the typical freshman fifteen and slowly gained weight from all of the choices offered in food service, exercising less and partying more until the end of my junior year of college when I got up to around 145 pounds. My senior year, I lived in an apartment, spent a lot of time driving back and forth to my fiancé’s, and going for walks with him in the town he was living in the evenings. By my wedding the following September, I was down to approximately 135 pounds. When my husband and I decided to try to get pregnant, I concentrated on eating healthy and exercising reasonably in an effort to aide conception (which didn’t really work because it took 5 months anyway). At the time I got pregnant, I was in the best shape I’d been in at @130 pounds. The several years from when I began dating my husband until I got pregnant with my daughter were the only times I ever had healthy, functional relationships with food and exercise. Other than basically trying to choose and cook healthier foods and trying to exercise when I could, I didn’t obsess over calories or exercise. I didn’t really think about it much at all.

After my daughter was born, I was able to count calories and lose my baby-weight to get down to 145 pounds. I still had a relatively healthy relationship with food and exercise as I thought about it but didn’t obsess. And I was satisfied with that weight; it allowed me to eat pretty well, not exercise like a fanatic and wear size 12 jeans. I got huge when I was pregnant with my son @3 years later and was only able to get down to @160 pounds after he was born. This is when the battle at the fat end of the spectrum really began. I gained and lost and gained and lost until I reached my high weight of 181 pounds about a year ago. Sadly, this was about what I weighed the morning before I gave birth to my son. After being off of high blood pressure medication for a couple of years and then put back on it, I decided I really needed to do something. So I joined Weight Watchers. After 9 months, I’d lost a whopping ten pounds. Weight Watchers is a great program—if you’ve never tried to lose weight before and if you need guidance on how to eat. I’ve known since I was 14 what foods I should eat and how to prepare them in order to lose weight. The problem was doing what I knew I should be and getting it to work. So I quit Weight Watchers. I was so sick of counting points that I tried to just mentally keep track of my calories and try to eat the best I could. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for me as I gained back half of the weight I’d lost in the ensuing 6 months.

Early this past June, I went for my annual checkup and was assigned lab work which I didn’t get around to getting drawn until @3 weeks later. The results were a worsening cholesterol reading of 227 total so my doctor put me on a statin to try to lower my cholesterol. The high cholesterol really took me by surprise because one thing I’ve always been good at is eating low fat and low cholesterol foods. So here I am, 35 years old, and I have 2 of the 3 big heart disease risk factors (high blood pressure, high cholesterol & Type 2 diabetes). I have strong genes for heart disease. My father has coronary artery disease and my maternal grandmother died of a heart attack at the young age of 62. So now what am I going to do? I’ve got lots to do. I don’t want to die. So now I’m back to counting calories, fat grams and all that crap with the FitDay computer program.

Counting calories scares me because in the past, after doing it awhile I started to trick myself into believing if you don’t count the calories, the calories don’t count. In the past I’d skip a day of counting calories and load up which basically defeated my entire purpose. The most valuable thing I did learn from Weight Watchers is not eating enough can actually make you gain weight—this goes against every sensibility in me, seems totally counter-intuitive and counterproductive but after giving it thought, makes sense. This was probably why after high school I started to gain weight by only eating 1500 calories daily. My body had gotten so used to working on much lower provisions it just packed it away for later. To me, eating, exercise and weight have always been all or nothing endeavors. I either eat too much or not enough. I either exercise relentlessly or skip it. I’m either on a diet or totally off.

In the past week or so of being on my statin, avoiding alcoholic beverages so as not to protect myself from heart disease just to give myself liver disease, I’ve realized something new. Marriage makes me fat. I’m happily married and, therefore, comfortable. My husband and I enjoy eating and drinking together and my body doesn’t hamper our marital relations. He loves me “just the way I am.” Okay, well that was great when I wanted to lose weight for cosmetic reasons but now that my health is involved, it’s a totally different story. So now when my husband asks, incredulously, “You can’t have ANY alcohol,” and when I ask what he wants for dinner and he answers, “Juicy burgers or real brats—not those turkey ones”, I wonder, is he TRYING to kill me? My husband complains his gut has dropped and the scale reads higher than he’d like but he still looks like he’s a normal weight and he doesn’t go to the doctor to find out his stats so he goes on in denial and oblivion. But I can’t.

The choice sometimes seems to be to eat and drink myself to death or suffer through life, bored and depressed because I can no longer consume the things I enjoy. I know the balance is in there somewhere and maybe now that twenty years have come and gone, I will finally find it. And so the infinite journey continues. I may die fat, I may die skinny or I may die somewhere in between; however, this I know: I will die trying.

The other night as I was listening to the rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air, I got to thinking about what the way in which people shoot off their fireworks says about their personalities.

First, we have the seemingly very few of us who are ultra-cautious law abiding citizens who enjoy the show put on by the surrounding neighborhoods but do not personally shoot fireworks. This is a group to which I relate and understand. Personally, I don’t venture beyond sparklers and snakes because I am too cheap and figuring in the cost of gas, it would be cheaper to burn my actual money than drive all the way to Wisconsin or Missouri to purchase fireworks. The other reason and probably more influential is my fear of getting caught. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in our town light fireworks from sometime in June through August, maybe saving a few for New Year’s Eve. I figure the one time I would try to put on my own show, I would either get stopped at the border or caught lighting them; either way they’d be confiscated and I would feel even worse about spending the money because I didn’t get the pleasure of blowing it up.

Second, we have the early birds. These individuals have not quite grown up. They have their hundreds of dollars of fireworks but cannot wait until night falls before using them. So they are out at 8:30 when the sun is setting but it is not yet dark, unable to resist their pyrotechnicican hiding inside bursting to get out. There are several of these child-like fireworkers in our neighborhood as the bottle rockets start screaming and firecrackers start popping shortly after dinner-time. The real impatient ones confuse Memorial Day with Independence Day and start using their fireworks at the end of May.

Third, we have the “average” people whose personalities fall somewhere in the middle of the bell curve. The explosions in our neighborhood become increasingly frequent until they reach a crescendo at about 10 p.m. and continue, making it seem as if we’re in the middle of a war zone until about 10:30 p.m. when, I assume, they’ve run out of fireworks—a direct correlation to when they ran out of money at the fireworks stand. Colored fire in the night sky must be addictive because once the fireworks start, it seems they are cumpulsed to light one right after the other until they’ve shot off every explosive they can get their hands on.

Next, there are the few, the disciplined, diligent, masterful, irreverent few who are able to delay gratification. They are able to portion out their fireworks, do a little here and a little there, making them last well into the night. I bet these are the same people who can buy a box of their favorite cookies and eat one each day while the rest of us may open the box with that intention but a half an hour later are left with a lap full of crumbs. Some of these people are too pragmatic, however, lighting their fireworks every 15-20 minutes until 2 or 3 in the morning. I wonder what these people do between shoot-offs. Are they sitting in their houses, chewing their nails, watching the clock and counting the seconds? Or maybe they sleep and set their alarms. And is it really a strategy to make the magic last or to avoid being caught by the police? I suspect it is probably some of both.

Finally, we have those completely alien to me—those who do not go for the pretty lights in the sky, the glittering ashes, or starburst configurations but just seem to enjoy the noise. I see the attraction of the traditional fireworks, to light up the night, striving to rival the grand-finale at municipality sponsored fireworks displays, to see their children’s faces lit up in shades of red and green, dazzled with the joy of discovering what happens when grown-ups play with fire. I enjoy the sizzle of what I call the popcorn-fireworks and anticipating the thunder from the explosion as it hurls through the night from the point of ignition. I do not see the pleasure in the “bang” from firecrackers or giant “boom” from M-80s without the pretty lights. And it is hard to say any more about it because I just don’t get it.

But I realize that is the point. Though they are illegal, people can and do still set off fireworks. Unless they have party-pooper neighbors, light them as a police officer happens to be driving by or wear out their welcome into the wee hours of the morning, they will be allowed to carry on. Sure they may blow up their hand, blow out their teeth (lesson from my father-in-law—never hold a lit firework in your mouth), get them confiscated, get a fine or whatever such offenders get, but they can still make that choice. And that’s what independence day is about—the freedom to choose how to blow your money, to take the chance, and take the consequences. USA is freedom to choose WITHOUT INFRINGING ON SOMEONE ELSE’S RIGHTS so please buy the best fireworks you can afford so my family can enjoy them without spending a penny, BUT if you are in my neighborhood, it is 2 a.m. and you’ve not depleted your arsenal but can’t wait until another night, you better hope I’m really tired because I WILL call the police. Too much of good thing is not a good thing, especially at 2 a.m.